Thinking East, looking West

That’s what Michael Wacholder, director of Rensselaer Technology Park in North Greenbush, said during a Rensselaer County Regional Chamber of Commerce luncheon last week.

Wacholder said that when former Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President George Low was interested in studying the feasibility of creating a tech park in 1979, he was thinking of Stanford’s industrial park, created in 1951, as a model.

The comparison is important because the RPI tech park and the incubator that were created in the 1980s by RPI have helped launch many of the tech companies that have become the foundation of Tech Valley here, Wacholder said.